“I must have bowled a slower ball … or he thought I was quicker than I was!” – Tyron Henderson can’t quite remember dismissing Kevin Pietersen.
TELFORD VICE in Cape Town
TYRON Henderson, Virat Kohli and Sachin Tendulkar are connected by cricket, but there their association would seem to end. Including his 664 international matches, Tendulkar played 957 first-class, list A and T20 games. Kohli has featured in 681, 416 at the highest level. Henderson played 284 matches, only one of them for South Africa.
While Kohli’s striking face advertises everything from smartphones to steel and Tendulkar is still signing endorsement deals almost seven years after playing his last match for India, not one billboard anywhere in the world offers passersby a look at Henderson’s dazzling smile.
Kohli and Tendulkar each boast more than 30-million Twitter followers. Durban-born, East London-based Henderson, now 45, doesn’t have a Twitter account. As he told Cricbuzz: “I don’t really do much social mediaring.” But he is on Facebook, where he describes himself as the “lawn mower and booze buyer at 2 Swans Bed and Breakfast, Restaurant and Wedding Venue” on a farm.
He was out attending to those duties the first time we tried to reach him. “He’s busy mowing on our tractor,” his wife, Alison Dalbock, said. “As soon as he comes home I’ll get him to phone you.” No doubt Anushka Sharma and Anjali Tendulkar have had many similar conversations with reporters. Not.
Even so, there are dots to connect Henderson, Kohli and Tendulkar. Make that a single dot: in the 2009 IPL in South Africa, they each bowled 36 deliveries. It’s an odd bit of trivia, and not because of the obvious: frontline batters face exponentially more balls than they bowl. In Kohli’s case, more than 28 times as many. Tendulkar faced upwards of four times more deliveries than he bowled. Henderson? He faced 4,640 and bowled 22,483. He sent down almost five times as many balls as he countenanced. But, in T20s, that ratio narrows to just more than twice as many. Henderson was a fast bowler who had more than his fair share of strength, confidence and hand-eye coordination, and he used these attributes to hit lustily. In white-ball cricket, particularly in T20s, that made him an allrounder.
In 2008 he helped Middlesex win their first T20 title, finishing second among the competition’s wicket-takers, sixth in terms of economy rate, and fifth on the strike rate list. He also scored 281 runs in 11 innings, and only six players had a better strike rate than his 180.12. His 21-ball 59 not out won the semi-final against Durham. In the final against Kent he batted at No. 3 and hammered 43 off 33, and was entrusted to defend 16 off the last over. That seemed a comfortable cushion but Justin Kemp was dropped in the deep off the first ball and a wild throw after the third went for four, squeezing the equation to six off three. Kemp took two off the fourth but missed the fifth. Henderson’s final answer was a superb yorker, which Kemp dug out — bunting the ball straight back to Henderson, who ran out his compatriot to seal victory by three runs.
Exceptional though Henderson’s performance was, it wasn’t surprising. He was named South Africa’s top domestic T20 player for 2004-05, cracked the nod at international level in a T20 against India at the Wanderers in December 2006, and was seriously regarded as the most successful bowler in the format in the world by 2008.
So how come he played only two games and bowled just 36 deliveries in the 2009 IPL? The question might be better asked of Shane Warne, who captained and coached Henderson’s team, the Rajasthan Royals. “Shane and I didn’t quite click, and that hurt my chances,” Henderson said. “What could I do? I had to sit around. He was in charge. His word was law. He’d say: ‘If I tell you to move, just move. It might be only five paces and I’ll move you back two balls later, but don’t argue. I’m just getting into the batter’s head. I’m not going to do anything different. But he’s wondering what I’m going to do now’. He was very aware of what he was doing and what he wanted to do. That’s what made him one of the best bowlers ever.”
Warne has, in fact, offered an explanation, albeit obliquely, for why Henderson was so under-used. In his autobiography, No Spin, published in October 2018, Warne highlighted a concept he called “the three-second chill” — a short pause players could take even in the intensity of the match situation to set themselves and solidify, mentally, what they were trying to accomplish.
“An amusing insight into the benefit, or otherwise, of the three-second chill involved a batsman, Tyron Henderson, the South African who had a good T20 season at Middlesex in 2008,” Warne wrote. “Manoj [Badale, Rajasthan’s co-owner] had seen him smash it in the English T20, loved his stats and signed him. Before the start of the second IPL season in 2009, Tyron came out to bat in a practice game for us and, first ball, went for an almighty six — he swung so hard he threw himself off his feet, missed it, of course, and lost his middle stump.
“‘Snapey [sports psychologist Jeremy Snape]’ asked him later what was going through his head.
“Oh, mate,’ he answered, ‘I get so nervous, I just swing at the first ball.’
“‘Snapey said, ‘Well, I tell you what you should do, Tyron. Take centre, face up to your first ball and play it properly.’
“Tyron played two games for us, made five runs and got hammered when he bowled. A Manoj beauty at $600,000 a year. But he’d won the English T20 with Middlesex, finishing with a strike rate of 180.12 and 21 wickets at 7.42 runs per over, which is probably why Manoj saw him as a good buy. Go ‘Moneyball’!”
The passage is riddled with sloppy errors. Henderson was far more a bowler than he was a batter, he in fact scored 11 runs, all in one innings, he had a better economy rate than eight of the 14 bowlers Rajasthan used in the tournament — the captain himself was his team’s third most expensive bowler — and he was sold for $50,000 more than Warne claimed. But it’s the snide tone that stings. Of all the players Warne has shared a ground and a dressingroom with, why would he single out for such unkindness someone as affable and easygoing as Henderson?
That said, there does seem to be more to Henderson’s relationship with Warne than the South African’s slightly grudging respect for the Aussie might reveal. “I never saw him eat,” Henderson said. “He might have a handful of cheese or something small. But he lives on vitamin pills. We went out for supper one night and he didn’t order anything to eat. But he loved the gambling tables.”
Maybe Henderson’s innate modesty grated against Warne’s über ego. Perhaps Warne couldn’t understand, and was thus a touch unnerved, by someone who didn’t take himself entirely seriously all the time. Told the premise for this piece was to track down players who had been on IPL teams’ books but hadn’t seen much gametime, Henderson concurred: “I would be one of those chaps, wouldn’t I.” That didn’t mean the experience didn’t leave him frustrated: “Once, the team said I could go home for a couple of days, that they didn’t need me for a game in Kimberley. And then I get a phone call from Kimberley to say: ‘If you were here you would have been playing; it’s your kind of wicket’. Well, thanks for bloody nothing. I played the first game and the last game, and I sat around for a lot of games inbetween.”
At least he had the satisfaction of dismissing Kevin Pietersen, his only wicket of the tournament. “Did I?” The memory didn’t register even after Henderson was reminded Pietersen had rushed his stroke and been caught at midwicket. “I must have bowled a slower ball … or he thought I was quicker than I was!”
His laughter tailed off as he offered a more sober analysis of what he brought to the party. “My value came in the fact that I could bowl off-cutters, leg-cutters, and I could change my pace. I had pretty good control. I used to change my angles; use the crease and things like that. As a batter I was expendable because whatever happened happened fast — either I got out quickly or, if I got going, we scored lots of runs very quickly. As a bowler I was reliable and dependable. I hit my areas more often than not. I never bowled at the easiest stage of the innings — it was up front and at the death. So I had to have decent control and I think that was my strength. Unfortunately I never got the chance to use it [in the 2009 IPL].”
Rajasthan were champions in the inaugural IPL, but they won only six of their 14 games in 2009 and finished third from bottom and out of the running for the semi-finals. The franchise bought Henderson out of his contract before the 2010 tournament and he didn’t make the shortlist of 60 players who were up for auction. He never appeared in the competition again, and played his last significant match, for Middlesex, in July 2010.
Managed better and treated more fairly, might he have happier memories of the IPL? “Quite possibly, but I wasn’t given much opportunity. Rajasthan and the Deccan Chargers ended up bidding for me at the end of the auction [for the 2009 tournament]. I might have got more games playing for Adam Gilchrist [the Chargers’ captain]. You never know.”
Still, the money Henderson earned came in handy. He and his wife opened what would become an award-winning restaurant on their farm. They bought also an apartment “across the road from Lord’s”. When Middlesex played at home “it took me four minutes to walk from my front door to the changeroom”.
Henderson spoke from the splendid isolation he and his family, which includes 13-year-old Chad, who has spent a good chunk of his childhood breaking batting records at his primary school, have been forced into by their possible exposure to the coronavirus while on holiday in Mauritius. “We’ve been in self-isolation for a week and we’ve got another week to go. When we flew to Mauritius there was absolutely no coronavirus there. Three or four days later they had three cases, all of them people who came back to Mauritius from overseas. On our fifth day there we were changing accommodation. Unbeknown to us, because we don’t speak Creole or French, the authorities had locked down the country from six o’clock that morning. We were on the beach waiting for a woman to bring us the keys for the apartment we were supposed to go into, and the cops chased us off. We were on a flight home at 4pm the next day, all of us wearing masks.”
As it has for all of us, especially in the past few weeks, life has moved on for Henderson. But he hopes cricket will still be part of his: “I do a little bit of coaching. I’ve helped out Border a few times, things like that. I want to do some T20 coaching. That would be a lekker [cool] thing to get involved with.”
If he needs another smidgen of trivia to talk himself into conversations which might help make that happen, there’s this: Henderson shares another distinction with Tendulkar — both of them played only one T20. And this: Tendulkar and Kohli have also dismissed Pietersen. He edged Tendulkar to slip in the 2007 Oval Test and Kohli had him stumped in a T20 at Old Trafford in August 2011. Perhaps Tendulkar and Kohli remember their successes better than Henderson does his.
Our conversation ended with: “If you’re ever up this side of the world, give us a shout and come and have a steak at our restaurant.” The invitation, it doesn’t need saying, isn’t likely be extended to Shane Warne. And not only because he wouldn’t come hungry.
First published by Cricbuzz.
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